At Salesforce, we have a 3 building setup here at One Market, there’s two gray ugly towers, and one nicer brick building. The towers are named Spear and Steuart for the streets they are on, and then the nice brick building we call Landmark, I’m not exactly sure why. The Development teams were spread out over two of the buildings Spear and Landmark and someone decided it would be good to get the teams as close together as possible. It was decided that all us devs would consolidate to the Landmark building, which meant I had to move from my Spear tower desk. Here’s a picture of spear here (Its the taller one on the right).

I had a nice spot too, a pretty good view, quick access to the beer fridge, and close to the team. Here’s my desk.

Yes its one small side desk with two gigantic 24″ monitors on it, and I’m in a small corner with a large palm. But it has a nice view!

I was a mixed bag of emotions. I did have some nice perks; good view, was sitting right next to the important members of my team, and then there was that I wasn’t sure where we were headed. But since I had about 10″ of desk space after all my computer equipment, I figured the trade off might be worth it.

As you can expect, being here only a half dozen months the re-org was able to give the better window seats to the more senior developers, though I would expect nothing less especially if I was one of those senior developers myself.

The move turned out much better then I imagined. I’m amazed that any company gets anything like this right when presented with an opportunity, but Salesforce did a really good job. The manual labor was provided for us, all we had to do was box and label our personal items, computer equipment and chairs and it showed up at our designated cubes the next morning with our computer equipment already setup.

The Landmark building was as big a character upgrade inside as it was outside. Its colored better, its got exposed brick walls, and its just a better feel.

Our desks are great, they went from an ugly gray (or white in my case) to a nice speckled wood color, the cubicle walls are a bit lower so you can see peoples top of their heads but looking around doesn’t weird anyone out and make them stop working. Also with the open desk layout vs enclosed cubicles, we have a tendency to converse from our chairs and break out in random friendly conversations a bit more. We still get just as much work done so its not at the expense of work, but I think its more efficient conversation time.

So even though I lost out on my nice view, a larger desk, an office with some character, a much better color scheme and better cube layout won out.